Musee de Quai Branly

It seems silly to post about the vertical garden at Musee de Quai Branly and fail to post photos of the more traditional landscape that abuts the building, designed by paysagiste Gilles Clément.  

 

The garden's biggest gesture is the installation of a massive glass wall - this is to protect the landscape from harsher winds that may pass along the Seine.  The pragmatist in me had doubts about this.  On the one hand, why use a plant palette that needs a glass wall to adjust its microclimate?  Also, a glass wall only looks good when it's clean.  A rainstorm and accumulated city dust will only make the space seem more bleak.

That said, it does present some creative uses for signage and announcing the space and events at the museum and does provide a necessary security measure.

The approach the restaurant-side of the museum is above.  Massive grasses and 'naturalistic' looking plants are placed in broad swaths.  It's refreshing to see such an enthusiastic departure from a more traditionally French landscape (not that I don't have a soft spot for Andre Le Nôtre).

Of course, the museum seemed to still be working out some kinks with the oversized plants.  This is apropos to yesterday's rant about public spaces being under pressure to have an 'instant' landscape and consequently planting things far too close together.

In other areas - this is facing the museum directly (through the glass wall) with the Seine behind me - plants were still struggling to establish. 

 

I suspect that they may have had some erosion issues here - perhaps water was pitching down the slope and eroding some of the soil and mulch away.  Again, these photos are from October 2007, and the museum was still quite new.  I took a brief glimpse of the landscape later, in September 2008, and it looked like it was evening out. 

The aggregate paving was interrupted by 'ancient' stone paving.  Scattered among the joints of these stones were glass cubes with anthropological objects encased with them.  A creative way to bring the museum's collection outside, though the glass was scuffing a bit, which compromised the clarity of the view.

Another gesture in the paving.